In the end, John’s deep desire to make me understand that “Western literature, post-Enlightenment, is centered around illusionism” is just too hard to take at 2:00 P.M. after the consumption of half a case of beer and the elementary particles of Ben’s Proto Pipe. I’d rather touch foreheads with Sara in metaphysics class. Four years later, after John discovers something called humor studies, I have no choice but to place him smack in the middle of my first novel.
And now let’s zoom out a little. A bench on the eastern half of Stuyvesant Square, a then-shabby park divided by the screaming traffic of Second Avenue. A bunch of boys sitting on the bench, several stinking of Indonesian Djarum clove cigarettes and unwashed hair. Occasionally, for exercise, we will get up to play Jihad Ball with a rubber Koosh ball.
The rules are simple: You take the ball, point to someone, and shout, “I do declare jihad on you.” Then you throw the ball at the jihadee and watch the rest of your friends pile on him. Ben and John are passing around the Proto Pipe, talking, as we all do, veryfast, veryfast, veryfast, Freud, Marx, Schubert, Foucault, Albert Einstein, Albert Hall, Fat Albert, Fats Domino, Domino Sugar refinery. Across the cement expanse of the Park, just a jihad ball’s throw away, sit endless numbers of Asian girls picking away at stir-fry, steamed mandoo dumplings, and thick rounds of vegetable kimbap in white Styrofoam containers. In theory, at least, they are living the Stuyvesant dream of good grades and bright futures. A part of me wishes I could join them, but even more of me wishes I could understand who they are.* When the senior yearbook comes out I will be able to peek just a little bit inside their hearts:
“Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Ephesians 6:1. I love you Mom, I love you Dad.” —Kristin Chang
“I am crucified with Christ, therefore I no longer live. Jesus Christ now lives in me!—Embrace the Cross.” —Julie Cheng
Meanwhile, Brian’s lips are attached to his girlfriend’s, a fact I jealously espy, and mine are attached to a tallboy in a brown paper bag. Since I’ve started drinking, I’ve started drinking. Kahlúa and milk with Sara, Fifth Avenue rooftop screwdrivers with Alana, another girl I’m chastely in love with, vodka and tonic, vodka and grapefruit juice, vodka and vodka, pitchers of hard cider in the afternoon at the Life Café on the corner of Tenth and Avenue B. In true alcoholic fashion, I divide the day into quadrants of booze, the rise and fall of the sun regulated by clear and brown liquors. I’d tasted alcohol many years before Stuyvesant—I am from a Russian family, after all—but here with my outcast friends every twenty-four ounces’ worth carries me a little bit away from the dreams I can no longer fulfill. Because even as I’m chugging away in the Park, my mother is deep in the bowels of the Beaux-Arts Stuyvesant building, standing at the head of a long line of similarly teary Asian mothers, begging the physics teacher to pass me in her sweet but not fully there English, telling him, “My son, he has trouble to adjust.”
Booze. It sands away the edges. Or it makes me all edges. Take your pick. When I laugh now, I hear the laughter coming from far away, as if from another person. I hear that bright, crazy laughter of mine, and then I hear it submerged in the bright, crazy laughter of my colleagues, and I feel brotherhood. Ben! Brian! John! Other Guy! I do declare jihad on you!
Would it be outrageous to say that at this point in my life alcohol is the best thing to ever have happened to me?
Absolutely. It would be outrageous. Because there’s also pot.
In an attempt to help me deal with peer pressure Mama and the newly arrived Aunt Tanya have shown me how to smoke a cigarette and stream it quickly out of the right side of my mouth without really inhaling. The three of us stand in the backyard of our Little Neck house, fall leaves scrunching underfoot, fake smoking, and acting nonchalant like in the movies. “Vot tak, Igoryochek,” Mama says as I let the smoke spill out of my mouth, my nose hungering after its sweet, forbidden smell. That’s how it’s done, Little Igor. Now I can pretend to smoke cigarettes or pot just like the cool kids. I apply this knowledge to my first fifty or so encounters with the evil weed, pretending to be even more stoned than the rest of my friends, screaming my nonsense: “Peace in the Middle East! Gary out of the ghetto! No sellout!” But on the fifty-first time, somewhere at the beginning of junior year, I forget to exhale.
If alcohol obliterates me, the pot unpeels me. Down to the nub. The last 234 pages you have just read—they never happened. There was no Moscow Square, no Lenin and His Magical Goose, no Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, no “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him, we have the technology,” no Gnorah, no Mama, no Papa, no Lightman, no Church and the Helicopter. Down to the nub, as I’ve said. But what if the nub’s no good either?
And when the pot laughter comes out of me, it is slow and deliberate, starting from my toes and ending in my eyelashes. As it travels up my body, it tickles the nub, and it doesn’t matter whether the nub is good or bad, just that it’s there, stored away for future use.
How does one transition from Republican striver to absolute stoner? I will never be fully accepted into the crowd, much as I will never learn the words to Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love.” If I’m lucky, I’m maybe invited to every third party, and the prettiest of the girls still keep their distance from me. But the “hippies,” as they’re called, are the closest I have to a group of friends. When I see carved into a rotting school desk the words “Fuck all Hippies, Gideon take a shower,” I feel angry at the author of such words and also a strange wish that I myself could smell that bad. If only I could be the opposite of what I was raised to be. If only I could be a fully natural being like this Gideon, whose father happens to be some kind of American genius at something and whose family lives in a sprawling West Village penthouse.
I love the boys, but Manhattan is my best friend. Walking down Second Avenue on a Friday night, I pass a man and woman in cheap tight clothes, standing in the middle of the sidewalk crying in each other’s arms. Crowds of teenagers gingerly walk around them, not exactly stunned by this display but respectful of the unabashed emotion. Everyone around me is silent for at least a block. I double back to take another look. The woman’s face is barely visible, but as she leans back I notice her slightly Persian cast, the parabola of her long lashes, her coarse red lips. She is beautiful. But so is everyone else. It is hard to walk from the Safe Train on Fourteenth Street to the school on Fifteenth without falling desperately in love.
This is what I’m learning. Men and women, in various combinations of gender, are exchanging small bits of sexual information with their eyes, then rounding the next corner as if they had never met. Yes, my eyes say to nearly every woman who passes, but they only scowl and avert their eyes (No) or smile and look away (No, but thanks for thinking of me). Finally, on a soupy summer day, a young woman walking ahead of me lowers her shorts so that the curve of her posterior is visible. She turns around and flashes a brief, gap-toothed smile. She starts to walk faster. I can barely keep up. There are now several men on her trail, most of them young professionals in suits, all of us silent and needy. Every few blocks, she lowers her shorts a bit more, bringing out little bellows of disbelief from her followers. Suddenly she runs across the street and disappears into a doorway, laughing at us before slamming the door. We look around to discover we are on Avenue D, in the shadow of some fierce-looking projects. This is the farthest I have been from Little Neck, and I am never going back.
The greatest lies of our childhood are about who will keep us safe. And here an entire city is coming together with its fat, ugly arms around me. And here, for all the talk of muggers and blade swingers, no one will hit me. Because if there is a religion here, it is the one we’ve made. Parents, obey thy children in the Lord, for this is right.
* * *
* Later, I will devote more than a decade to this task.
The author has been rightfully crowned the King of Medieval Times. To the left is his blushing queen.
BACK IN QUEENS, my parents sense that I’m going off the rails, b
ut they’re actually quite nonviolent about it. My father patiently tries to diagram the workings of a combustion engine so that I may survive physics. My mother begs forgiveness from teachers on my behalf. Everything is being done to make sure I can recover grade-wise in time for law school. And while my mother is unhappy that I show up at three in the morning drunk—“Why, why didn’t you call us if you were going to be nine hours late?” “I ran out of quarters, Mama!”—my parents did both grow up in Russia and understand how young adult life works. On the few occasions when I return from a virginal night out with a girl, my father will take time out from slicing up one of his prized heirloom tomatoes at the kitchen table to query, “Nu, are you a man yet?” He’ll lean in and smell the air around me. And I will sigh and say, “Otstan’ ot menya,” Leave me alone, and stomp, stomp, stomp upstairs to my Playboys and my Essays That Worked for Law School.
The elite among us, on the other hand, are waist-deep in it. There are parties all the time now. I am introduced to the best of Manhattan real estate. Lofts on Mercer Street, classic sixes along Amsterdam, a penthouse on West Tenth Street with wraparound views of that still-living, still-breathing animal Greenwich Village. A Battery Park City apartment so close to the towers of the World Trade Center that after a few joints I think I can spot my reflection within their steel-and-glass sheaths (not possible). There’s teenage canoodling everywhere. And why not? The apartments all seem to be abandoned by their adult owners. The parents are gone. Building rocketry in distant lands, advising the Croatian constitutional court, growing coffee in the highlands of Kigali. All these brilliant progenitors of all these beautiful people are time zones away. It never occurs to me that having goofy immigrant parents in uncool Little Neck is somehow preferable to the wild state of affairs so many of my coevals now find themselves debauched in.
And so, in a dozen empty apartments, among several dozen hairy people, there is the happy exchange of sex to which I am not privy. Pleasantly stoned, headed to the bathroom, I hear light moans and giggles from one direction, bedsprings from another. I stand in front of the door, aroused, confused, trying to summon my Dr. Ruth knowledge. That sounded like a vaginal orgasm. That one, clitoral for sure. Out on the terrace, the sun is setting over the flaming fire-lookout tower of Jefferson Market and Fellow-Sufferer John is dismantling a turkey deli sandwich over a thing of beer. “Jew, wakka-wakka,” he says. “Hermeneutics.” And so on and so forth, for a good long while, until we take the Long Island Rail Road home.
Whom am I in love with? Let me count the girls. Ten? Fifteen? Twenty? I love indiscriminately and openly. A tall, classically pretty girl with circles under her eyes. I take her to the Central Park Zoo, my idea of romantic. She brings a friend. Then one of her long, alternative fingernails accidentally scratches my hand something terrible, a scar I still bear. There’s a fluffy buxom blonde with clear blue eyes who lives in a Village townhouse with her divorced mother. Mama opens the door, appraises my harmlessness, and allows Fluffy out for a date to the Bronx Zoo, where I buy her an elephant we name Gandhi. I take her to a French restaurant in midtown. “Let’s just be friends.” There’s Sara whom I have tantric sex with in metaphysics class. There’s a tall Korean girl, Jen, who lets me massage her feet. “You have to be greedy, selfish, and immoral to survive in this lifetime” is Jen’s yearbook quote. Mine: “ ‘Virtue has never been as respectable as money’—Mark Twain.” Soul mates. There’s curly-haired, skinny Alana (not her real name), whose Fifth Avenue apartment and permissive parents I will soon appropriate for my first novel. I spend many nights, head spinning, on her spare couch, next to a bathroom smelling of kitty litter and two actual cats, Midnight and Cinnamon. Past midnight, lovesick, Alana comfortable in her big bed elsewhere, I once again stare out of the kitchen window next to my couch at the spire of a brown Gothic church. A mutual friend of ours has told me that Alana thinks my nose is too big, so that’s not going to happen. Interesting about the nose: My father had always called me Yid-face, but he had said my lips were the problem. Now the nose, too. Anyway, I am in an apartment full of brilliant Manhattanites, next to a box of kitty litter, and outside a moon hovers over the church and the broad expanse of Fifth Avenue at the juncture where it leads up to the dramatically European flourish of the Washington Square Arch. The famous street is empty save for one beat-up old taxi. It is going to snow soon.
But someone does love me. His name is Paulie.* He’s in his forties. I have an after-school job working for his ____† company in the meatpacking part of town, although it’s hard to tell what exactly I’m supposed to be doing there. To bait me into his middle-aged clutches, Paulie puts up an advertisement on the Stuyvesant work board asking for a smart teenager and promising six dollars an hour. He first hires me and a Russian girl, but the Russian girl smells of meat and sweat, so she lasts only a few days. At my behest Paulie hires Alana, too, but it’s not her he wants! It’s me! Half of our days are spent tearing down city streets in his car as he leans out the window and shouts in his ____ accent‡ to passing women, “Hey, beau-tee-ful! Jew got a nice ass! Don’t deny it!” Over the course of several years, we get lucky, let’s say, never. “I’m no fag,” Paulie says, brushing aside the curly remains of his dyed hair, but he does talk about how he would like to bend me over the desk and do ____ and ____ to my ass.
I am incredibly flattered by Paulie’s attentions. Although he’s much older, he also wants to become a writer someday, maybe chronicle his escape from ____§ on a raft with the help of the CIA. At work, I’m in charge of getting lunch for the whole crew, mainly burgers from Hector’s Cafe or arroz con pollo from the Dominican place. He yells at me when I get it wrong, but when I get it right he calls me Prince Pineapple, along with some snatches of Spanish. “Nice going, Prince Pineapple, puta maricón.” I can smile for an hour after he says that. One day Paulie takes me down to Florida for a little vacation, a jaunt that will inspire a long, scary chapter of my first novel. On the morning before I leave, my father sits next to me on the couch while my mother rifles through the bag I’ve packed for Florida to make sure I have my asthma inhaler and sunscreen. “Your boss …,” my father says. He sighs. I flex my white winter toes. Does Papa suspect that my boss wants to pork me? “Sometimes,” my father says, “I’m jealous of Paulie because he seems like more of a father to you than I am.”
“Oh, no,” I say, “please. You’re my father.”
Several days later Paulie and I are sitting in a rented Buick in front of a deluxe Sarasota condo, his hand on my knee. Paulie points at the condo. He looks exhausted from pursuing me, as exhausted as I would be pursuing all those girls back at Stuy if I were his age. “Look,” he says. “That condo up there can be yours. Your family can use it anytime. Think of how happy you’ll make your parents. I just want …” And his hand creeps up my thigh.
I laugh the way girls laugh when I try to put the moves on them, and then I take his hand off my thigh, feeling its heat and heft. I’m a little scared and a little happy that my second father takes such an interest in me. If only I were at all turned on by him. This is just like one of those Tolstoy novels where X loves Y, but Y loves Z.
There’s a picture from that trip with someone’s arm over my shoulder. Not Paulie’s, but the Queen’s. I am standing there, curly haired, wearing some kind of Mexican blanket pullover along with the paper crown of Medieval Times, a dinner-and-jousting-tournament place near Orlando. The Queen looks like an advanced teenager in full medieval regalia. Off to the side, Paulie is laughing at me, making motions with his hand to show what I should do to Her Highness. My shoulders are slightly hunched, arms dangling beneath them, because it’s unusual for a woman to touch me, but my off-white, Soviet-toothed smile tells me that I am loved. It is one of the happiest moments of my life to date.
Time is speeding up. College is almost upon us. Almost one-fucking-third of our graduating class has submitted research papers in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. I, on the other hand, still haven’t been on top, beneath,
or behind a woman. One of the few nights that I’m not out drinking and drugging with Ben, Brian, and John, or trying to get with Sara, Jen, Fluffy, et al., I’m lying in my bedroom with colorful American college brochures spread out around me. Downstairs, the razvod is looming. Aunt Tanya and her children have come to America. My lithe, pretty cousin Victoria, the ballerina, has been sharing a bed with my mother for more than a year, refugee style, while my father broods in his attic. Both her parents have died, including my mother’s older sister Lyusya, and the twenty-year-old Victoria is stuck with us until she can find her own apartment. My father offers her valuable advice: With her looks, she should work in a strip club. I pass Victoria shyly on the stairs or look at her across the dinner table, scared and confused by her presence, wanting to talk to her but worried about taking sides between my mother and father. It’s a little bit like when we were young and I stared at her across the glass of our French door in Leningrad, unable to touch her because of my mother’s fear of mikrobi (microbes). But there’s something else—for the past decade I’ve been working ridiculously hard at becoming an American, and now there’s this Russian girl in our midst, a reminder of who I used to be. In the room she shares with my mother, Victoria listens to country radio because the words spill out slow and easy, and she can pick up some English. “Country music sucks,” I tell her, rolling my eyes, ever the urbane, helpful cousin. Ever my father’s emissary.
Because now it is total war. Now my father and his wolfish relatives are suddenly outmatched by the new arrivals. It is time for my parents to engage in a frank exchange of viewpoints. “Zatkni svoi rot, suka!”Shut your mouth, bitch.
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